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ously compromised, and, as was inevitable, a reaction has 
set in. Our business hereafter will rather be to shield the 
glacial theory from undue disparagement than to complain 
of its extravagancies. 
Dr. Hitchcock, with the enthusiasm of his nature, had 
at first expressed himself too favorably of this hypothesis. 
He retracted his expressions when called to account for 
them by Marchison. In an article which he sent to Silli- 
man’s Journal, July 5th, 1842, he insists that Murchison, 
in his Annual Address, ought not to have charged him with 
being an advocate of Agassiz’s ideas in an unmodified form ; 
for, “although the Etudes sur les Glaciers had, indeed, thrown 
a flood of light unexpectedly into his path, yet he had always 
thought, and still thought, that the moraines of America 
- were produced by icebergs, and not by glaciers.” “ What- 
ever impression,” he writes, “my language has conveyed, I 
now declare that I have never supposed it possible to apply 
the glacial theory of Agassiz to this country without modifi- 
cation. I stated [before the Association of Geologists at 
Boston, in April] my conviction that glacio-aqueous action 
has been the controlling power in producing the phenomena 
of drift, by which I mean the joint action of ice and water, 
without deciding which has exerted the greater influence.” 
These words give us a clear knowledge of the attitude of 
his mind in the presence of a discussion which filled the 
geological world with clamor at that time as it does to-day, 
and obliged every geologist to define his position. His slow 
and cautious disposition, disciplined by field work on the one 
hand, and by college lecturing on the other, restrained his 
imagination from adopting any large hypothesis, but confined 
him to a few familiar statements of mere fact. All he 
knew, or cared to know, or believed that any one would 
ever know, was, that a sheet of loose sand, gravel, and boul- 
